West Kowloon Cultural District (Improving Hong Kong 3 of 3)

There are some good inten­tions behind the pro­pos­als for the new West Kowloon Cul­turual Dis­trict. Hong Kong does need more venues, espe­cially a larger venue for Ballet and clas­sical con­certs and a large aud­it­or­ium for tour­ing pop and rock acts (who often bypass Hong Kong all together).

Hong Kong also needs to diver­sify it’s eco­nomy with more sup­port for arts, design and eduac­tion and is lag­ging behind as an Asian des­tin­a­tion for cul­tural events in general.

Hence the plan to con­vert 40 hec­tares of water­front land in a giant cul­tural hub. The poten­tial is dizzy­ing and it has inspired a lot of local debate. Not sur­pris­ingly, there are some who see no bene­fit in the focus on arts and want more retail, com­merce and typ­ical tour­ism (mer­chand­ising, maybe a new ocean ter­minal, lots of hotels, etc) to crowd the space. But, thank­fully, they rep­res­ent a minority.

There are also some who feel the devel­op­ment, will, in and of itself, solve all of Hong Kong’s cul­tural prob­lems — that it will, some­how, magic­ally lead the city to the centre of Asia’s arts and degisn industry. That isn’t going to happen.

To do that, HOng Kong needs to rethink the role of design and arts across the whole met­ro­polis. It needs to rethink eduac­tion, rethink hous­ing, rethink retail, rethink the prox­im­ity between where people live, owrk and social­ise and it needs to rethink manufacturing.

If Hong Kong wants to become a design and arts hub it needs to become, again a place where people make things, in every dis­trict, not just a place where people spec­u­late on the “value” of things. Arts policy has to start and focus on the level of neigh­bour­hoods and communities.

What WKCD can tackel are a small set of the bigger strucutal issues. A showpiece museum, a big aud­it­or­ium and high end aud­it­or­ium could be put together in a glob­ally attrract­ive pack­age, some­thing that would be HK’s own ver­sion of Sydney Opera House, or Guggenheim.

But, the import­ant thing to remem­ber about the Opera House, apart from the con­tro­versy that ssur­roun­ded its con­struc­tion, was that it took a long time for the site to really take off as a cul­tual venue and for the city to “love it.” In fact, the Opera House “area” many tour­ists take for gran­ted is actu­ally the product of thirty years of devel­op­ment along the shoreline, together with a learn­ing exper­i­ence for tthe City of Sydney in how to use the space — what you have today did not emerge overnight in it’s com­plete­ness and was neither the product of a comit­tee, or of one visionary.

West Kowloon could become a showpiece cul­tural site for Hong Kong over time, but to fill the venues in a mean­ing­ful way er the next 20–30 years, Hong Kong will have to expand it’s city­wide com­mit­ment to arts, cul­ture and design from the grass­roots up. Only then will it have a suf­fi­ciently large pool ot talent and col­lab­or­a­tions to make the new site any­thing more than a circus for vis­it­ing acts.